Goethe in Marienbad

Appropriately, if only by name, the legendary Bohemian Spa of Marienbad is a place of alchemical associations, harking back as it does to the legendary alchemist Maria the Jewess, “divine Maria” or Maria Prophetissa, the supposed sister of Moses, who was the inventor, among other alchemical apparatuses, of the celebrated balneum Mariae or the bain Marie: the double boiler.

Eternal will be for you the One that self-divides Into the Many and, remaining One, remains eternally the only One.Find the many in One, feel the many as One,Then you will have the beginning, the end, of art.The Soothsayings of Bakis

Appropriately, if only by name, the legendary Bohemian Spa of Marienbad is a place of alchemical associations, harking back as it does to the legendary alchemist Maria the Jewess, “divine Maria” or Maria Prophetissa, the supposed sister of Moses, who was the inventor, among other alchemical apparatuses, of the celebrated balneum Mariae or the bain Marie: the double boiler. Maria is the source of one of the central alchemical axioms: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and, out of the third, comes the fourth as the one.” Or: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and, by means of the third and the fourth, achieves unity; thus two are but one.” She also said: “Join the male and the female and you will find what is sought.” Or, more alchemically stated: “Marry gum with gum in true marriage.”

Goethe, to my knowledge, does not mention Maria, but, as we shall see, he certainly lived by her principles, for Goethe’s whole work—all “fragments,” as he says, “of a great autobiography”—is Hermetic through and through: his poetry, novels, and dramas no less than his science, which is explicitly so.

Continuing with alchemical associations surrounding Marienbad, there is also the odd, possibly Hermetic, fact that it was Josef Jan Nehr, the doctor of the nearby Premonstratensian Monastery of Tepla, who, at the end of the eighteenth century, began to promote the healing properties of the mineral springs belonging to the Order. Until then, only locals knew of them because of their inaccessible location deep in a rugged valley. The Premonstratensians had always included alchemy, Hermeticism, and medicine among their interests, and therefore it is not unlikely that a Hermetic motive in the largest sense inspired both the doctor and the Abbot, Karel Kasper Reitenberger, a personal friend of Goethe—and perhaps even inspired them to name their Spa as they did. Hermetic (and Herculean) likewise was the effort to reclaim the inhospitable terrain: vast amounts of earth had to be moved, ravines filled in, bogs drained—in all, a staggering job of landscaping, recalling the end of Faust Part Two, when Faust himself is engaged upon such a project of raising nature into art.

Which, if any, of these associations most appealed to Goethe is unknown, but he began visiting the Spa in the summer of 1819, eleven years after the first spa house was built. He had just published his West-East Divan—his homage to the peerless Persian poet Hafiz—the only full-length lyrical work he published in his lifetime. Celebrated as the first work of “world literature,” the Divan was intended to overcome the dichotomy of East and West by raising it to a higher unity.

The title page is in both German and Persian, as are the half titles of the twelve books that make up the collection of more than two hundred poems. But the title itself is not simply translated: in typical Goethean fashion, its apparent unity actually conceals a duality. Facing the German—“West-Easterly Poetry Collection”—the Persian reads: “The Eastern Poetry Collection of a Western Author.” Thus, the German sounds a dialogical or synthetic note, whereas the Persian indicates something more unified and provides a more integral, monological, or unified note. The poems themselves—Sufi-like invocations of divine and human love—are dense and allusive in their language, which draws both on the Bible and the Qu’ran, as well as Western and Persian (Hafizian) traditions. Multiple un-attributed citations from East and West are embedded in the text. The whole work echoes the then-emerging sense of the Eastern origin of the Bible, which cast doubt on the supposed opposition between East and West by demonstrating that religion was one and oriental in origin.

Who knows Self and OtherWill cognize hereThat East and WestAre to be divided no more. *The West is God’sThe East is God’sNorthern and Southern landsRest in the peace of his hands.

He, the only Just One,Makes Justice for everyone.Of his one hundred namesLet his one be highest praised: Amen

Goethe had always been interested in oriental studies, and above all, Islam. Over the years, he read and reread the Qu’ran intensively, making his first notes in Hebrew and Arabic when he was only twenty-one. Throughout his life, in fact, he studied and collected Arabic handbooks, grammars, travel books, and whatever translations of Eastern poetry and philosophy he could find. As a collector, he bought original manuscripts of Rumi, Hafiz, Attar, and others. Himself an accomplished penman, he admired Arabic calligraphy and was delighted when a page—the last Surah—of an antique Qu’ran came his way.

All this came to a head in 1814. In May, his publisher Cotta sent him a copy of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s translation of the complete poems of Hafiz. Overwhelmed, he recognized a kindred spirit: another self. So close did he feel to Hafiz that it’s as if he believed that in another lifetime he himself had lived, loved, and strolled in the gardens of Shiraz. In June, he wrote:

Just then, too, Russian Muslim soldiers were billeted in Weimar. “Who would have dared to say a year or two ago,” Goethe wrote to a friend, “that a Mohammedan service would be held in the hall of our Protestant Grammar School and that the Surah of the Qu’ran would be murmured there?” Perhaps he experienced a kind of conversion then, for as he said later: “The poet… does not refuse the suspicion that he himself is a Muslim.”

Emotionally, however, this was not a good time for Goethe. His marriage was becoming more difficult. The burdens of his official position oppressed him. So he did what he always did in such situations: he went in search of love.

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On July 25, he left Weimar for Frankfurt, his old home. The journey was extremely productive. Powerful, inspired poems came down, above all, “Holy Yearning”:

Tell it to no one, only to the wise,Because the crowd will only mock:What lives will I praise,What yearns for death by flame.

In the coolness of the love nights That begot you, where you begot, A strange feeling comes over youWhile the still candle shines.

No longer are you hemmed inBy the shadow of darknessAnd a new longing rends youFor a higher copulation.

No distance is difficult. You fly onward and enchanted.And finally, passionate for the light,Butterfly, you are burned.

As long as you do not have this:Die and become!You are but a cloudy guestOn the dark earth.

By the end of August, he had written thirty poems, and met an old banker friend, Johann Jakob Willemer. Willemer introduced Goethe to his longtime “little friend,” Marianne Jung. This “dear little woman” would become Goethe’s inspiration—his Suleika—and a co-conspirator in the Divan. Later, thinking of Marianne, Goethe would speak of “a temporary rejuvenation,” a “repetition of puberty,” explaining: “This can happen to outstandingly gifted people, even during old age, while other people are young only once.” For Goethe, such a renewal of the springtime of human life was the means of new birth, of dying and becoming.

Though the relationship with Marianne was completely secret—and nothing in a physical sense happened—Willemer must have sensed something for, on September 27, on Goethe’s insistence, he married her after eighteen years of cohabitation. Nevertheless, in October, Goethe and Marianne spent nine “unforgettable” days together in Frankfurt. Poems continued to be written and Goethe, having named Suleika, gave himself a name, Hatem:

Now that you are called SuleikaI should also have a nickname,When you praise your beloved, Hatem is the name to use.

The following summer, Goethe enjoyed six long weeks with the Willemers. In the morning he wrote, appearing at noon in his frock coat. In the afternoons: a walk. In the evenings, dressed in his white flannel robe, the Master read poems—mostly from the Divan—and Marianne played her eight-string guitar and sang folksongs. Goethe gave her a copy of all he had written for the Divan so far. Mysteriously, he noted in his journal: ”Divan. Beginning—End.” What only he and she knew was that he had also given her a poem, “Hatem”—

It’s not opportunity that makes a thief,Because it itself is the greatest thief:It stole what was left of the loveThat still remained in my heart.

It handed over to you,The sum of all my fortune,So that now, penniless,I depend on you alone for sustenance.

—And that, a few days later, Marianne had returned with a poem of her own, “Suleika.” Goethe made a few corrections, copied it, and placed it with the other manuscripts. Marianne was to write three other poems—they have been called the most beautiful poems written by a German woman—and they likewise, un-attributed, became part of the Divan. Here truly was unity in duality.

This accomplished, Goethe hastened to Heidelberg to confer with Orientalists and biblical critics, and to deepen his study of Arabic and Persian. His grail: to discover and reconcile in himself in a new, higher unity the multiplicity of monotheism’s divine expressions. Such unity was always Goethe’s goal, for he well understood the alchemical truth that unity only divides in order to find itself again in a higher sense. As he wrote:

Anything that enters the world of phenomena must divide in order to appear at all. The separated parts seek one another again, and may find each other and be reunited: in the lower sense by each mixing with its opposite, that is, by simply coming together with it, in which case the phenomenon is nullified or at least becomes indifferent. But the union can also occur in the higher sense, whereby the separated parts are first developed and heightened, so that the combination of the two sides produces a third, higher being, of a new and unexpected kind.

Just then, the Willemers themselves appeared in Heidelberg. Goethe took Marianne into the castle grounds, where he showed her a Gingko tree. Presenting her with a Gingko leaf he suggested something of its “secret meaning” by asking: “Is it one thing that divides into two, or two that unite into one?” On their last day together, September 26, walking through the park, he inscribed “Suleika” in the sand in Arabic. Goethe and Marianne would never meet again. Filled with emotion, Goethe plunged again into the study of Persian. The next day, he sent her the poem “Gingo Biloba,” which he would place in the “Book of Suleika”:

This tree’s leaf, which, from the East,Is entrusted to my gardenLets us taste a secret meaningThat edifies the learned.

Is it one living being?That divides itself in itself;Are there two? Who select themselvesSo we know them as one?

To reply to such a questionI found, I think, the right sense:Do you not feel in my poemsThat I am one and doubled.

The two lovers become one in love—unity—but unity, which is love, is conditioned by duality. Hatem and Suleika are two, as is Goethe himself, who both loves and writes about it. His life is doubly double: hermaphroditic and inward/outward. He is both male and female, within and without. He lives and writes, is both subject and object, but what he praises and becomes is one, the unity of lover and beloved. To achieve this unity requires renunciation: to become love, he must renounce both himself and the beloved.

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All this is Hermetic. The opening poem, “Hegira,” announces:

North, West, and South are shattering,Thrones burst apart, empires shake,Flee then to the pure East,Taste the air of the Patriarchs:There, with love, wine, and songKhidr’s fountain will make you young again.

Khidr, a legendary figure in esoteric Islamic lore, is the “Green or Emerald One,” the source of all greening vegetation, freshness of spirit and eternal liveliness. He is a supra-earthly being, the throne of the angel of humanity, the true and only initiator of all saints, sages, and prophets—including Moses himself as the Qu’ran states. His fountain is none other than the fountain of life. His wisdom, drawn from “the living sources of life,” is the divine science of creation, and his disciples form the invisible, trans-historical spiritual order of those who have become truly free. Having attained the source of life, and drunk the waters of immortality so that he knows neither old age nor death, Khidr, the “Verdant One,” is the master of the alchemical elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone.

The Divan appeared in 1819. Marianne continued to write to Goethe sporadically, remembering his birthday, sending him poems, and never forgetting the gingko leaf:

It lets me savor a secret meaningThat edifies the one who loves.

Goethe reciprocated, never forgetting her. In 1832, just before he died, seventeen years after Hatem and Suleika became figures of speech, he collected her letters—“letters pointing to the loveliest days of my life”— into a packet and returned them to her, writing: “I would only like one promise, that you leave it opened for an undetermined time. Letters of this sort give us the happy feeling that we have really lived: these are the most beautiful documents upon which we may rest.”

Nevertheless, the ending of that beautiful moment left a void in Goethe’s life: his imaginal trip to the East and his travels to Frankfurt and Heidelberg would be the last journeys he would take—except for one. He was becoming too old for such distances. When the Divan appeared, he turned seventy. He became a patriarch, a legend, and a sage—but a lonely one. Three years previously (1816), his wife, Christiane Vulpius had died. His home life was chaotic and filled with dissension. Although he lived with his son, August, and daughter in law, Ottilie, and her sister, Ulrike, he could rely on no one. August was useless. Ottilie had no idea of housekeeping. Everything got dustier and dustier. Initially endearing herself to Goethe by her cultural aspirations, her instability soon turned her to a life of serial promiscuity. The marriage in pieces, August did the same. And amid the chaos, Goethe suffered—although in great style. Weimar had become the Goethe shrine. Visitors came daily to see him. He felt like a piece of statuary, a tourist attraction. Inspiration being out of the question, it seemed, he turned to putting his papers in order. He assembled his Italian Journey, using his old letters; he edited his Campaign in France from his old diaries; finally he dictated the two volumes of his Annals, the dry day-by-day account of his life. When he did write poetry, it was mystical and obscure.

In this mood, he began summering in Marienbad, now his favorite spa since he had exhausted the geology of Karlsbad. But it was not only Marienbad’s geology that drew him thither. In 1821, by apparent chance, he stayed in a pension run by a retired Prussian officer, Herr von Brösige, whose daughter, Amalie von Levetzov, he had met years before in 1806 when she was nineteen. Mysteriously, he had then noted in his diary: “Pandora.” Now she was thirty-five, separated, but not divorced, for her husband was a Catholic—and she had three daughters. Her partner, a Count Klebelsberg, had built the pension where Goethe stayed for her parents.

Goethe took to the daughters immediately. They had just the freshness and youthful vitality that he needed. He was particularly taken with Ulrike, the middle one, who was seventeen. She had just returned from finishing school in Strasbourg, where Goethe too spent his student days. They spent hours together, chatting about the town where both had spent student days and about which Goethe had written at length. Much of this, however, was lost on Ulrike, who did not really know who the old man was. She called him “the great scholar.” Yet Goethe appreciated her innocence. He spent his days geologizing and botanizing, and his evenings with Ulrike, telling of his finds. Since she did not make much of his stones, he slipped a piece of chocolate amongst them: that got her attention. After that, he brought her flowers.

The following year, Goethe reunited with the Levetzovs. As usual, he attended the receptions, promenaded, went to the balls, and flirted with all the pretty girls, but clearly faraway his favorite was Ulrike. Soon, everyone was jealous of her: only through her could one gain an introduction to the Great Man. Meanwhile Goethe began to observe her with increasingly great emotion, carefully noting all the different attitudes that she presented. Gradually, but not unexpectedly, what began as a mere “love interest” turned into a great passion—though the lover was now seventy-three, and the beloved but eighteen.

Returning home to Weimar, Goethe’s mood became tumultuous. He swung daily from ecstasy to depression. He fell ill. Some said he nearly died. In January, he noted in his diary: “I am imprisoned! As if in a deep, deep tomb.” He was caught. Around the same time, he wrote:

If only I could flee from myself!The cup is overfull.Why is it that I always striveFor things not meant for me? *Ah, if only one could be well again!What insufferable pains!Like a wounded serpent,It turns and twists in one’s heart.

In February, a darker mood seized him, lamenting the “masses of psychological stuff” that “have burdened me for three thousand years.”

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By the summer, his feelings overwhelmed him. “In an impassioned state,” as he puts it, he conceived the idea of marriage and consulted a doctor to discover whether the institution would be detrimental to his health. The doctor, with a smile, said it would not. Goethe then took the Grand Duke Karl August into his confidence and told him of his plans. At first, the Grand Duke teased his old friend, but then, seeing he was deadly serious, was moved by the sight of this white-haired old man—the greatest man in Europe—begging him to be an intermediary. Accordingly, he paid a formal call to Frau von Levetzov and presented her with Goethe’s offer of marriage, even going so far as to assure her that Ulrike would always be taken care of financially. Gently, but firmly, she turned him down.

Somehow, even though the matter had been handled with the utmost delicacy, everyone knew of it. Letters flew in all directions. Goethe even wrote to his daughter-in-law, darkly alluding to his passion, and hinting at the possibility of the addition of a “third” or “fourth” person to their household.

On the same day, amazingly—for the tragedy had yet to run its course—Goethe heard the beautiful Polish pianist Symanowska play. He fell in love with her, too—so unstable was his “impassioned state”—and wrote in her album the verses on “reconciliation” that would conclude the “Trilogy of Passion”:

Passion brings suffering. Who, anxious heart,Can soothe you, who have lost so much?Where are the hours, so swiftly flown by?In vain was the greatest beauty chosen for you.The spirit is clouded, the undertaking confused;How the glorious world disappears from the senses.

Then the music soars on angels’ wings,Tone upon tone, a million notes intertwining,Penetrating the core our innermost beingAnd filling it with eternal beauty:The eyes moisten, and you feel with higher longingThe divine value of tones and of tears.

Thus, the heart is made light and quickly seesIt still lives and beats and would still beat moreIn purest gratitude for this given gift,That it would return in willing offering of self.Then you feel—o that it would last forever—The double joy of Music and Love.

Reconciliation was not yet however Goethe’s present state. He would still propose marriage to Ulrike again himself. Again, gently, he was rejected. Hastily, the Levetzovs left Marienbad for Karlsbad. This was August 17. Three days later, Goethe noted in his diary: “A quiet night. Conciliatory dreams.” Then, on the 23rd, he too left Marienbad, supposedly to visit his friend Grüner in Eger, stopping on the way to gather more mineralogical samples. He is after “undulatory slate rich in flint” and “pyrotypical stones of several kinds.” From Eger, he sent Ulrike a poem saying that she dwelled so much in his heart that he cannot understand how she is elsewhere. Meanwhile, he talked with his friend Grüner about the mineralogy and geology of Bohemia and visited the pharmacy to view its “weather glass.” All seemed fine, but in his diary he also noted “work on the poem”—the poem of his agony. Finally, he arrived in Karlsbad, taking rooms at the same Inn where the Levetzovs were staying—his immediately above theirs.

On the surface, things still went smoothly. August 28 was Goethe’s seventy-fourth birthday. He told no one of it. It would be a secret—he would organize an excursion for that day. But when he came down to breakfast, he found in his place a cup on which a garland of ivy was painted. “Why the pretty cup?” he asked. “To remind you of our friendship,” he was told. “Ivy is the symbol of friendship.” Later, at the picnic, he was given a glass on which the names of Frau von Levetzov and her three daughters were engraved. “Despite it all, “she said, “We don’t want to be forgotten. Remember us always and also this occasion.”

The days following unfolded like those at Marienbad, social events punctuated by mineralogical expeditions. Ulrike read to him from Sir Walter Scott. In his dairy he noted: “On the whole she reads well and without affectation, but she ought to read with more energy and vivacity.”

On the morning of September 15, after a “tumultuous farewell,” Goethe left, and as the carriage rolled along he began to compose to its rhythm and with perfect objectivity the main section of the “Trilogy of Passion,” “The Marienbad Elegy.” Goethe knew well, as he had written in his play Torquato Tasso and echoed in the first poem of the Trilogy, “To Werther”: when a person is speechless in his pain, a god will help him speak his suffering.

By October, the god had spoken. On October 23, Goethe asked his amanuensis, Eckermann, to stay a little later than usual. As the gloom of dusk grew deeper, Goethe asked him to bring in and light two exquisite wax tapers. Eckermann would read something. Goethe brought in “The Trilogy of Passion.” It was calligraphed in perfect Roman characters on the finest vellum paper and fastened with a silken cord into a red morocco case. When Eckermann had finished reading, Goethe said, using Frankfurt slang, “Gelt?”—that is, “Well, ain’t it so? Haven’t I shown you something pretty good!”

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The next month, November, the pianist Madame Symanowska played in Weimer. Goethe was asked to propose a memorial toast. He cried out:

I do not suffer memory in the sense you mean. Whatever enters our life that is great or beautiful or important is not to be remembered merely from without, hunted down as it were, but from the start it must be woven into the very heart of our being, united with it, so that it might create within us a better self and thus live on in us eternally active. There is no past for which we have a right to long, there is only what is eternally new, formed from the expanded elements of what has gone before; true longing must always be productive, must always create something new and better.

After La Symanowska left, Goethe collapsed. Word was that he was near death. But when his friend Zelter visited him, he saw the truth, noting in his diary: “I stand at the door… Is there death in the house? …August comes: ‘Father is not well, ill, very ill.’… I approach closer… What shall I find? What do I find? Someone who looks as if his body is racked with love, all the love of youth with all its agony. Well, if that is what it is, he will get over it! No! He must keep it, he must burn like quicklime.”

Burn he did, and rise from the dead he did, and the poem—ritually unveiled for Eckermann with candles like a sacred text—remained for him a numinous thing, a gift of the gods.

He gave it three parts. The first part, “To Werther,” was written to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of his famous early work The Sufferings of Young Werther, which had made him celebrated throughout Europe and set off a rash of sympathetic suicides for love’s sake. For Goethe, this is not an occasion for looking back, for once again he is himself in the same situation as Werther was: still in love with nature, in love with love, and, “caught in love’s magnetic lure in a woman’s form,” separating, dying, in a—very particular—particular love. Confused strivings between inside and out still tear him apart. Perhaps, after all, Werther took the right decision:

I chose to remain, you to depart,You went ahead—and have not lost much.

After all, as always for Goethe, yet again, “the farewell awaits”—as if there were no higher life without death, as if life were, if rightly lived, a continuous dying and becoming. He ends:

You smile, friend, full of feeling, as befits you:A horrible separation made you famous;We celebrated your wretched ill-fate,You left us behind for better or worse.Then once again an uncertain pathOf passion drew us into its labyrinth;And, entangled in repeated need, we endOnce more in separation—separation is death!But how stirring it sounds, when the poet singsTo avoid the death that separation brings!Half guilty and caught up in such torments May a god give him to say what he suffers.

What the god gives him is the “Marienbad Elegy” itself. It is an astonishing performance. Hardly Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” it is the thing itself, not subjectively, but in its own suchness. After beginning with his act of gratitude—:

Though in their torment most people fall silentA god has given me the power to say what I suffer.

Goethe continues almost theologically:

What can I now hope for from this reunion,From this day’s still closed blossoms?Paradise and hell stand open before me;How fickle-mindedness rules in my heart! But enough of doubt! She steps to heaven’s door, She lifts me into her arms.

And I was received into paradise,As if I deserved eternal, beautiful life;No wish, no hope, no desire was left me—Here was the goal of my inmost aspiration;Beholding this singular beautyThe source of my yearning tears was overcome…

The day passed in gentle bliss until, with a chaste, last kiss, “cruelly sweet,” the “splendid tissue of intertwining love” was ripped apart. It was as if a fiery cherub drove him out of Paradise. The gate closed. His heart—filled with self-reproach, remorse, and despair—likewise shut, as if never opened. Yet the world’s beauty—nature in all her fecund glory—was still there; the canopy of the cosmos still poured its invisible powers upon the earth. Even, in the blue ether, she floated toward him seraphim-like, “the loveliest of loveliest forms.” But perhaps that was a fiction: better hold her in his heart. How she had welcomed him! How each act had inscribed her in his heart, which would preserve itself for her and preserve her forever in eternal gratitude! He had thought love was lost until she appeared. Then, within his heart, she became a sign of hope renewed, and faith, and peace:

In the purity of our heart a striving stirsTo surrender ourselves in voluntary gratitudeTo a higher, purer Unknown,Unriddling the eternally Unnamed:We call this state: piety, a blessed heightI feel in part when I stand before her.

Before her, all self-seeking melts away. In her presence, all self-interest and self-will disappear. She teaches only the goodness of life, as it exists moment to moment. One need only look each moment in the eye, be childlike, then you will be all things and invincible.

Yet she is gone! What does that moment demand? Tears, frenzy, a heart split open, and a life-and-death struggle: pain, solitude, more tears. And he ends:

Leave me here, true companions, Leave me alone with the rocks, marsh, and moss.Hold to your paths: to you the world is open,The earth is wide, the sky sublime and great.Observe, research, and gather the details, Nature’s secret will be stuttered out.

I have lost the All. I have lost myself,I, who have been the darling of the gods,Who tested me and gave me Pandora, Who is so rich in blessings and richer still in dangers.They pressed me to bountiful lips,Cut me from them and destroyed me.

“In every great separation,” Goethe wrote in his Maxims and Reflections, “lies a seed of madness; one has to be careful not to foster its growth.” Such partings are death and one could die. Goethe, of course does not: there is reconciliation; there is always a higher longing still, dying into which we are reborn.

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Goethe’s great theme—in poetry, in science, in fiction, in drama, in human relations, as in life—was always unity in multiplicity (or division) and multiplicity in unity. As he put it: “To divide what is united and unite what is divided is the very life of nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal syncresis and diacresis, the rhythmical breathing of the world, in which we live and move and have our being.” (Theory of Color)

Like the old alchemist Maria, Goethe knew that creation and consciousness arise as Primal Love between One and Two, Unity and Duality. He understood that in the moment that Unity looks at itself it sexualizes or polarizes and begins the sequential processes of expansion and contraction whereby, reuniting, it becomes conscious of itself. Years of patient observation and study of nature, society, and his own heart had taught him how unity divided to become a field of love that unfolded through embodied affinities. Over and over again he had seen how these affinities, through their perpetual self-transcendence, determined the harmony of the relationships specifying the individualized powers of the universe—all yearning to be brought together again in unity. In everything Goethe did—whether in science, poetry, drama, or fiction—he sought to realize the famous adage attributed to Ostanes: “Nature rejoices with nature; nature conquers nature; nature restrains nature.”

For Goethe, the name of this nameless One-Many/Many-One is Nature. Goethe’s great love was always Nature, and Nature was love and Nature was the All. For him, the love that was Hildegard’s greening power of nature, Dante’s “love that moved the stars,” and the love that brought two human beings into unity, was a single love.

One sees this clearly in his famous early poems “May Song” and “Ganymede”:

How gloriouslyNature shines!How the sun glitters,How the meadow laughs!

Nature was always and everywhere for Goethe one with the “eternal womanhood” celebrated at the end of Faust:

Everything transitoryIs only a symbol;The unattainableHere become event;The indescribableHere is done:Eternal WomanhoodDraws us on.

Nature, for Goethe, was all. As he wrote: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to step out of her, and powerless to enter deeper into her…” Unceasingly, she shapes new forms. Whatever she does is new, yet always the same. She is the only artist, working up “the simplest material into utter opposites and arriving, without a trace of effort, at the greatest perfection, at the most exact precision, always veiled beneath a certain softness. Each of her works has its own distinct essence, yet all form one eternal life. Becoming, and movement, are in her, but she does not advance. She changes eternally, and never rests…” She has always thought and always thinks; though not as a human does. Above all, he claims:

Her crown is love. Only through love can one come close to her. She makes abysses between all beings, and all desire to intermingle. She isolates all in order to draw all together, holding a couple of draughts from the cup of love to be fair compensation for the pains of a lifetime.

In his Metamorphosis of Plants, he showed that from seed to seed a plant was only “leaf” metamorphosing through a seven-stage process of contraction and expansion. While his Treatise appears to be purely botanical, Goethe alludes at its beginning to its being something more. He calls the complete process—whose summit is reached in the union of sexes—“a spiritual ladder.” Elsewhere, he refers to “metamorphosis in the higher sense,” saying that it had already been excellently portrayed by Dante. Both of these metamorphoses are processes of purification (the progressive spiritualization of matter), renunciation (death and resurrection), and ennobling, around and creative of a central point. The endpoint, the seed, described as “the highest degree of contraction and development of its inward self,” comes after the hermaphroditic union of male and female in the corolla, from which fruit and then seed emerge. It is in fact clear that, just as the old alchemists saw all processes as essentially those of sulphur and mercury, so Goethe understood the metamorphosis of plants as an unfolding sequence of conjunctions or unions, deaths and resurrections, between male and female elements.

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As in nature, so in poet, who is nature too (with something “more” as she is likewise.) In his Divan, Goethe writes a poem called “Reunion”:

Can it be? Star of stars,Do I press you to my heart again?Then the night of separation:What abyss, what pain!Yes, it is you, my friend,Sweet, beloved counterpart:I recall past sufferings,I shudder before the present.

When the world lay in deepest depthsIn God’s eternal bosom,He ordained the first hourWith sublime creative desireAnd spoke the word: Let it become!Then a painful cry rang out,As the All in a gesture of powerShattered into separate realities.

All was mute, still, and empty:For the first time, God was lonely!So he created the dawn,Who took pity on the torment of separation,And developed through the gloomA sounding play of color, So that what had fallen apartCould now love again.

Then with hasty strivingThose belonging to each other sought each other,And feeling and gaze Returned to immeasurable life.Let each one seize and even snatch the otherIf they can but grasp and hold! Allah needs create no more:For we are now creating his world.

Thus, with wings of dawn,I was drawn to your lips.Star-bright night with its thousand sealsNow empowers our union.Exemplary are we two on EarthIn joy and pain:No second “Let it become”Will separate us a second time.

Goethe, here, is amazingly prescient. Whoever the Dawn is, she is clearly an intermediary, and a figure of Sophia or Wisdom. It matters little whether we call the two terms she mediates heaven and earth, spirit and matter, God and humanity, or God and creation. She is in-between, a veil that conceals and reveals, both the medium of theophany or revelation and sheer human creativity itself.

There is a hadith or saying that the Prophet Mohammed attributes to the Creator: “I was a hidden treasure and yearned to be known. Therefore I produced creatures, in order to be known in them.”

Perhaps Goethe knew this and knew how the Sufis, interpreting that saying, told the story of how the Creator suffered the solitude and sadness of not being known; and how his sadness and anguish at being unknown because unnamed, unseen, un-embodied—his desire to be known, which is the secret of his creativity—unfolded in a Sophianic “sigh of existentiating compassion,” an all-surrounding cloud that receives and gives beings their form. Henry Corbin calls this being, “the absolute unconditioned Imagination,” the creative, active Imagination.

She is certainly that. But above all, she is Sophia, Divine Feminine Wisdom, the sole path to wholeness who, as Solomon writes:

…Rises from the power of God like a fine mist,A clear effluence from the glory of the Almighty;…She is the radiance that streams from everlasting light,The flawless mirror of the active power of God…She is but one yet can do all things,Herself unchanging, she makes all things new.Age after age she enters into holy souls,And makes them friends of God and prophets, For nothing is acceptable to GodBut the person who makes his home with Wisdom.

Dawn, Nature, Wisdom, the Feminine Divine: Goethe above all made his home with these.

As for “Eros,” he was certainly her servant, ultimately teaching devotion to her alone:

He does not fail to come! He plunges down from heavenWhither he flew from the ancient void,To hover upon us on airy wingsRound our brow and breast the whole spring through,Now seeming to flee, now returning from his flight,Mixing anguish in our wellbeing, sweetness and anxiety—The heart wanders lost in the manyBut the noblest devotes itself to one alone.